


Terrible Sting And Terrible Storm (the bloodjacket remix)

by dashery



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Bugs & Insects, Feral, Friendship, Gen, Language Barrier, Physical Disability, Teaching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-30
Updated: 2016-07-30
Packaged: 2018-07-27 15:41:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7624366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dashery/pseuds/dashery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From "I See A Wasp With Her Wings Outstretched": "So what if a furr- a few deliveries don't make it? I've got a tricky address. I'm not wild," she adds, quick and forceful. "You're not going to cull me."</p><p>What if, when Nepeta and Terezi met, Nepeta WAS feral?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Terrible Sting And Terrible Storm (the bloodjacket remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [w0rm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/w0rm/gifts).
  * Inspired by [I See A Wasp With Her Wings Outstretched](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1126819) by [w0rm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/w0rm/pseuds/w0rm). 



1.

You haven’t lasted this long, small and bony with only an unborn lusus at home, without a keen nose for danger. The nose is metaphorical, of course, or metonymical—one sensory organ for the whole of your senses, and that’s a weird thing to think about when you’re running for your life. You guess that makes you weird!

You guess this as you scrabble your way up the huge trunk of a tree with your rough palms, thick claws, and shitty shoes, because even if you are weird, which wouldn’t be terrible, you are very, very smart, and capable of multitasking even under duress. Your rucksack slams into your back at every gecko leap like an out-of-practice hoofbeast jockey and it only spurs you on. Higher, faster. Your breath rasps in your threat and you are as exhilarated as you are terrified.

You’re being hunted.

It’s a troll, you made out that much when you started to run, but it’s only answered your questions—quite pertinent ones you called over your back, like, “What do you want?!” and “You think you can keep up with me? Ha ha ha!” (admittedly, you needed to work on your cackle) and “Can’t we, huff, cut a deal?”—with feral yowling and snarls. Sometimes it’s on your left, then ahead and to your right, and sometimes you have no idea where it is only you know if you stop running, you die.

You’re not really built for running, though. You’re more of a cool saunter, foreboding grin type of girl, and if you try to grin in the middle of this chase you’re likely to bite your own tongue off, and that would be a loss for everyone.

So you climb. You _are_ built for climbing, wiry, nimble, and sure-footed in the canopies. The trees here are massive and difficult for all but the masters, with none of the low, thick branches that would support a heavier troll’s weight on the way up. You’ve already reached the middle branches, the ones that will carry you and little more and keep you high and away from poor dirtbound saps.

“Nah, nanny nahHAGHK!”

You bite your own tongue and get back to running—flying, maybe, given where you are and what you’re doing, springing from branch to branch a splat-worthy distance above the ground.

Your hunter is built for climbing, too. Or at least its claws are. It leaps at the trunk and digs in, yanks itself up like it’s nothing. Clawkind specibus, you’re sure of it, because no troll has claws that long even if the telltale color of metal is masked completely by blood of every caste.

Other trolls or their lusii? You don’t know. You jump for the next branch.

These aren’t your woods; you’ve wandered far today, pursuing your treasure as long as you dare. Dawn nears, you can feel it in the stinging of your eyes. Your breath comes loud in your ears. But still, something warns you. Still, your mind works.

Something is buzzing.

You slow down without meaning to, at least not on a conscious level, and the troll hunting you crashes into you with much less care than even your rough-riding jockey rucksack, but she—it’s a she—swallows her own triumphant shout with a hiccup when the branch gives its first crack beneath your combined weight.

“You fucked up,” you tell her, and then the whole thing snaps.

You twist as you fall with the practiced ease of the kind of idiot who builds a hive several stories up in a bluebark. You’re wearing the coat Kanaya gave you two months ago, so it doesn’t hurt as much as it could as you loosen yourself, twist in the air, protect your head, and roll on impact. You end up rolling, you’re on a slope, and suddenly there’s a long, dead drop. You’re a painful, disoriented mess for a couple more seconds until you find yourself curled up on the floor of a depression in the ground. No. A hole, much deeper than it was wide. A burrow. A nest.

“I fucked up,” you whisper as you sit up, and your assailant, who has also fallen in, groans. Agreement, probably.

You sniff and sit up immediately, shelving your aches and pains for later, when you are not immediately on the cusp of being _about to die._ “You!” you point, heedless of your volume. “Are you bleeding?”

She rolls to her knees and sits up, reeling a bit, clearly somewhat dazed, though she fell well, too. She doesn’t answer, but she’s holding her arm, and you hiss, drop your bag, and strip out of your coat immediately. “Quick, patch it up with this! Cover it up! Don’t let them smell you!”

She takes the coat, startled, and you press it to the scrape on her elbow yourself, ignoring her pained yelp. The material is thick, durable, and smells strongly of dirt and of you, which might be enough to mask the scent of olive blood, at least for long enough to get out of this trap.

“Bloodjackets,” you tell her, and though she doesn’t answer, she allows you to bind the jacket around her arm with her eyes on the tunnels radiating from the bottom of the pit, not on you.

Bloodjackets are a species of wasp, each about as long as a small troll’s arm, which means they’ll measure about an arm and a half on you. Or the other girl, come to think of it. She’s even shorter than you, though somehow compact rather than scrawny. Her nose twitches as she scents the air, pupils rounding from predator’s slits to something more frightened. A smattering of freckles sweeps across her nose.

“We need to get out before we’re last week’s grubmeat,” you tell her as you re-shoulder your rucksack, and you try to scale the vertical walls of the deathtrap.

It’s not like climbing a tree. You find purchase, but it crumbles out from your hand or your shoe, takes you down in a rain of scree. The girl watches two of your miserable failures before she attempts an escape of her own, but her claws are as useless as yours in the sliding dirt, and she nearly falls on the first waspgrub’s head.

Both bloodjacket larvae and adults are blind, deaf, and flightless, sensitive only to vibrations of the earth and the smell, the unmistakable smell, of blood. In breeding season, females dig their nests, scoop out cells for their young from the bottom up, and then, instead of dying, take penthouse apartments. Though their wings are useless for flight at their size, the buzzing noise they create attracts hunters hungry for a mouthful of migrating fairy bulls. Sensing their footfalls, the adults creep out of their nest, and, well.

Their serrated stingers take up fully half the length of their abdomen. They’re full of paralytic venom. They’re full of eggs. They are Not Nice.

“Bloodjackets don’t get their name from their diet or where they live or anything. And, despite the name, they are not as fashionable as Miss Fussyfangs Maryam would perhaps assume,” you whisper, and your new friend gives you a weird look. “Some people think the Empress engineered them. What happens, clawkid, is that they sting their victims, inject them with flesh-melting toxins and eggs. The vics turn into dead bags of soup, and then, when the eggs hatch…KA-BLAM!”

You clap and the girl jumps. The questing waspgrub turns its eyeless head your way and starts to inch its way over. You grin apologetically, and the two of you likewise inch away, trying not to step too heavily. “The chemicals within the eggs react with the venom, and the corpses explode, releasing the newly hatched-grubs. The ensuing splatter reaches all the way to the highest cells of the hive.” You point to the top. “The adults get splashed, again and again, as more of their young hatch. So it looks like they’re wearing a blood jacket. Isn’t that the coolest thing you ever heard?”

You try a smile. The girl stares at you, then goes back to sniffing the dirt wall all around.

“I learned about them for a LARP campaign,” you tell her as you tiptoe first to one side, then the other of the narrow space as two more grubs peek in to say wassup, munchies. “Yeah, they were a _huge_ hit. We kept Vriska’s mom fed on the spoils for a whole perigee.”

Your friend growls at you, maybe to shut up, but it sticks high in her throat, and she stays as close to your back as possible. You breathe out. “Okay. Here’s how we’re going to do this. Give me your claws.”

The two of you have little time. She hardly seems to understand what you want—perhaps isn’t fond of the idea of you taking away her only weapons in a dire situation, especially when she’d been hunting you with them mere minutes ago—but something must have changed when you fell down the hole, because eventually, she lets you take one claw glove. You examine it, then break it, much to her hissy annoyance, and pull a long length of braided cord from your rucksack. In the meantime, the waspgrubs cast about blindly, slowly, at the bottom of the pit, trying to scent or sense you. You and your friend barely move as you work.

Eventually, thinkpan fueled by terror, you engineer a horribly floppy grappling hook and attach it to your rope. You always bring a rope on your expeditions. Never know when you’ll need to make a quick escape. Or a noose. “Now, we’re going to throw…”

You peer up, and up, and up. “Hm,” you say, which is different from humming nervously. It’s a thoughtful sound. Not a suddenly panicked one.

The girl grabs your hook from you, and you protest, “Hey!” but you guess it is half hers even if she did none of the work. She points straight up, head tilted, and you think she’s asking you something, so you nod. It’d be easier if she used words, but this is fine, too. “Why, yes! That is where we are going, my taciturn friend. Why, do you have an idea?”

Her eyes flick from you to the milling, hungry grubs, to the lip of the hole so far, far away. She licks her lips, then plays out some of the cord so the hook dangles low. She jerks her head towards the wall to her right.

“Certainly, Miss Mystery, I’ll get out of your way,” you agree. As soon as you do, she starts to swing the hook, slowly at first, back and forth, then a circle, then a spinning blade of fury.

You’re nervous about how close the waspgrubs are getting, so you say, “Hey, clawkid, I see that you’re engrossed in whatever physics calculations you seem to be doing, but if you could skip to the part where you _do_ the doing—”

She throws.

The hook catches on the edge of the hole and _sticks_ , and you release a squeaky sigh of relief that you would deny if anyone who could actually speak were actually here, actually, because you’ve realized rather late that your new best friend in the entire galactic empire cannot. Instead, you grin.

“After you, _vaquera,_ ” you offer graciously as you pull your rucksack back on, and she shimmies up that rope like she was born to it. You follow suit, leaving the waspgrubs behind, when it happens.

You’ve woken mother.

You and your miracle roper freeze, swinging two thirds of the way up the rope, freedom so close but the bloodjacket between it and you, and that’s it, you’re dead. It’s blind, but it’s hardly two feet above the girl, and if it gets a whiff of her, if your jacket isn’t enough of a barrier—

The bloodjacket tenses, feelers, well, feeling, and fast enough to give her daymares for the rest of her life, it crawls six-legged out of the hole and

Goes up.

It goes up, and something greets it with a yowl and the sound of ripping chitin.

Your new friend mewls happily and clambers so eagerly up the remaining length of rope you think she might accidentally knock you off of it. “Friend of yours?” you ask cheerfully before you realize that perhaps it’s not accidental, and grip more tightly.

It’s nothing compared to how tightly you cling when the rope gives a sudden jerk. “What are you doing?!” you ask, and it looks like you’re back at square one. You’re about to groan and hit your head against the wall, possible second adult bloodjacket be damned, when the tug comes again and you realize you’re being hauled up.

“Oh,” you say, watching the bottom of the pit recede beneath you. “Oh,” you say again when you reach the top and meet a double-mouthed lusus approximately twice your four-sweep-old size. You gulp, then smile broadly and wave. “Hey! I’m Terezi.”

Your new friend’s lusus sniffs you, takes the eviscerated bloodjacket gently by the thread-thin waist, and throws it into the nest for the babies to eat and poison themselves.

“Good work, all of us,” you say, and your friend tries to give you back your coat.

You look her over, notice her threadbare T-shirt and the spreading bloodstain on the fabric (hard to tell; some kind of green?), and signal to stop with your hand, shake your head. “Nah,” you tell her. “It looks good on you. I mean, that’s not traditionally how coats are worn, but girl, you work it.” Grin, grin.

The girl grins, too, bright and needle-toothed, and points to you. “Terezi?” she says, and you laugh in delight.

“Yes! That’s me. I’m Terezi.” You point to her. “And to what lovely lady do I owe the pleasure?”

She puts her hand over her bloodpusher. “Nepeta.”

2.

The next evening, you find a slain hoofbeast of some sort deposited at the base of your tree. It stinks to high heaven and hasn’t been cleaned, but you take it anyway. With the right preparation, it’s safe enough to eat, and you are starving.

After some difficult detective work, you leave a collection of fresh fruits and grubloaf rations at the entrance to Nepeta’s cave while she and her lusus are out hunting.

The exchange continues. One day, she catches you there laying out greenberries and root vegetables. She’s got a baby cholerbear slung over her back. You decide without speaking (or without speaking on her part nor understanding a word you say; you talk plenty) to share the wealth, and her eyes widen as she watches you cook her bear with more panache than just sticking it over a fire to preserve the meat.

You have stew, and you hear Nepeta purr for the first time.

Next time you meet, you bring all your old schoolfeeds, because it’s time to teach Nepeta to talk.

3.

It’s not as difficult as you imagined. She’s wild, of course, but she’s not unfamiliar with language per se; she and her lusus communicate in their own way, with the set of their shoulders and the rounding of their eyes. Nepeta’s eyes are huge. You wonder how you look to her, so skinny and narrow-angled. You hope she recognizes how impressive you know yourself to be.

Anyway, Nepeta’s wired for words, and she picks them up quickly, if haphazardly, and can express somewhat intelligible thoughts coherently after just a perigee or two.

“Thank, Terezi!” she says excitedly, licking fruit juice off her fingers. “Thank Terezi friend!”

In the meantime, you learn how to smile by blinking slowly, by allowing that moment of blind vulnerability. You learn that cats’ bites are worse than their claws. You learn how a hunter moves, and you work it into your own body, your own way.

4.

“Why are you teach me this?” Nepeta finally asks one day in the fourth month, around three in the morning.

Nepeta is frowning, more _furstrated_ than usual—as soon as she figured out puns, she started using them, and you encouraged her with mad delight—because you’ve brought her the first story you ever learned how to read: _In Which a Young Troll Says Good Morning to Many Hivehold Objects in an Infantile Manner, in Order That Actual Young Trolls May Learn to Recognize the Names and Spellings of Such Common Objects, Including Hive Blocks, Communication Devices, Wiggler Toys..._

_’In the great, pink block_  
_There was an oral communication device_  
_And a toy clock_  
_And a picture of_  
_Lowbloods getting culled at a shuttle dock…_

“Because it’s fun!” you reply, since that’s obvious to you. You wouldn’t travel here nearly every night if it weren’t fun.

She scrunches up her face. “But I don’t need read! These…what is these?”

“This is a book,” you tell her.

“These book, I don’t have any. I don’t need any. The…pic-ture, that is good, but the read, I make my own stories and those is fuuuurrrrrry fun. I want game, I want…play! I like game…s.”

“Strong finish, Nepeta! I’m so purroud of you.” You tap your claws on the cave floor, then push yourself to your feet, offer both your hands to your friend (who is actually a friend, now, and not some dumb epithet you invented when you thought she didn’t have a name).

“Hey, want to see something cool?”

Her enormous eyes gleam. “Yes!”

“Great!” You sling your rucksack over your shoulder. “It’s this way. I was planning to visit anyway after today’s playdate.”

She bounces after you, an excitable kitten. “Is it a dead thing?”

“Hmmm.” You make a show of thinking about it. “In a manner of speaking!”

“Meowner.” She giggles.

“Exactly that thing you said,” you say. “Let your mom know we’re taking a field trip, okay?”

You lead her through the forest, skirting dangerously near the old bloodjackets’ nest (they’re all dead, but something else took over the burrow, something you haven’t researched for your role-playing with Vriska) but taking a curving left to lower ground. The trees here get bigger, get older. Their smallest roots are as thick as you two are tall, together. You scale them effortlessly.

“This,” you announce, showing her the way into a clearing, “is the cool thing.”

From her intake of breath, you assume she agrees.

The tree, old but alive, and massive, is covered crown to stump in carvings. The newest, thinnest branches are bare, of course, but the tree is possibly, Terezi feels, as old as the planet, and the carvings somehow even older. They seem to glow with knowledge and insight, and Nepeta pads right up to touch them, gloved hands curious and respectful.

“What is these?” she asks, astounded.

“Letters,” you tell her, pulling your journal out of your bag and unerringly locating where you left off. While you continue copying the letters from bark to paper, you further add, “Letters in a language I don’t know—not yet—but recognize. These are the old laws, Nepeta, preserved for who knows how long in this old, ugly tree!”

You’re not sure if Nepeta looks impressed or not when she glances at you, but she says, “They’re beautyifful. They’re for laws?”

“They’re for everything.” You record a word and wonder if that’s the end of the sentence. “They’re for news. They’re for stories. They’re for everything we use letters for, only I’m fairly certain these ones here are mostly law! I can sniff out apodictic rulings from fifty paces, you know.”

“They’re for stories?”

Nepeta’s watching you for real, now.

“Of course they are, you adorable kittenloaf,” you say, which is the appropriate address when she takes that position, as she’s doing now. “And case law is kind of like stories, too. Who has done what to whom, what the local judges must do, that kind of thing.”

“Why they write? The old people with old laws,” she says.

“So they can remember? Don’t ask me, Nepeta, I haven’t read all this yet. It’ll take me, oh. At least a perigee,” you inform her as you stare at billions, trillions of letters, fifty of which could fit on one of the tree’s leaves, on one of your hands. “So they can remember, so they can make sense of things. I think the stories themselves are more important than _why_ , don’t you?”

“Yes,” she says, and you don’t change your mind about that until much later, when you're six sweeps old and “why” is all you have left to ask, when your favorite story’s all over.

5.

When she finds you, you’re sitting on the floor of your ablution trap, talking to your mother.

“I was talking to my lusus,” you tell her.

“Oh,” she says, and then, trembling, helps you bind the second-to-last wound Vriska will ever inflict on you.

(The last is harder even to bind than eyes. It’s somewhere inside you, an unsettling itch you will never scratch, a bruise that never fades.)

You heal. You learn. Your lusus teaches you how to smell, and you learn that you really do have a nose for danger, you just never knew it before. You learn how fear tastes, how joy, how close blood rises to the skin even for creatures like you, stone-grey and callous, probably scaled for armor beneath the skin. Definitely, figuratively.

But you don’t go to visit the Tree of Law anymore.

“Come with me,” Nepeta finally says one day, breaking character from the High Pouncillor role you thought for sure she’d never give up. She takes your hands, though you don’t need her to, you’re purrfectly capable on your own, but you let her, because she sounds faintly nervous and aching to please.

“What’s this all about, Officer Leijon?” swinging from one of your ongoing games to another as simply as jumping from branch to branch. “Do you have a warrant?”

She laughs, but she tugs you along, and you go without much fuss. Well, without much unignorable fuss, and the two of you play the whole way to the Tree of Law.

“Why are we here,” you ask, and you’re stiff this time. You didn’t see it coming. Wording intended.

“I want to show you something,” she says, and you hear her open the door to the inside, to the hollow tower of the tree that somehow still lives even with its guts cut out and its skin lacerated.

You know you won’t be able to make out individual letters, not when there are so many, not at your current level of scent-decoding. “That’s great, Nepeta, but, well, blind girl, here…?”

“I think it’ll help,” she says, and you weren’t aware there was help to need, and then you smell it.

She’s painted every letter in the tree, every single word, from the bottom to the top in all the colors she could mix: red and black and pale, chalk grey, and the green of greenberries, yellow extracted from some root she finds near the mountains. Every word is a different color, and their readers needn't worry about jumping a line; the colors follow the hemospectrum, everything in place to lead you from one law, one story, to the next.

“Is this okay?” she asks, tugging at the sleeves of her coat. “I wanted…you worked so hard on that book, Terezi, and you say you’re pawl right but you still seem sort of sad, and I…you’re my friend, Terezi. You taught me how to talk. You taught me how to read. If you hadn't, I...”

She’s still half-feral, sometimes, and bites, and purrs, and prefers pictures to a thousand words. But she has words, now. She’s one of you. She’s one of yours.

You smile and ruffle her hair between the horns, then throw your head back and laugh.

“It smells like a bloodjacket nest in here!” you tell her, because you know what the paints are made of, and she grins, too, and races you to the top.

**Author's Note:**

> Bloodjackets are loosely based on digger wasps, which do not explode.
> 
> I was so happy to get the chance to remix one of my favorite works of all time. Happy Ladystuck, everyone!


End file.
